depression Archives • The Confident Man Project

Self Esteem

How To Heal Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma

Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma is a term I coined this morning to describe feelings of unworthiness and insecurity that are passed from parents to their children down successive generations.

Parents who feel fundamentally unworthy create a lack of secure attachment with their infants, leading to children with insecure, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. When these children grow into adults, they pass the trauma on to their own children through their inability to bond emotionally with them. Everyone in the family ends up with emotional abandonment trauma manifesting as core feelings of unworthiness.

In other words, parents who feel fundamentally unworthy, insecure or broken are unable to raise children with deep feelings of worthiness themselves.

The cycle repeats down the generations until someone recognises and breaks it by doing the emotional healing work to deal with their own traumatic attachment wound, so they can create a secure attachment to the children in the next generation.

I have experienced this personally, and believe it is the underlying issue that undermined my own self-confidence for so long, ultimately leading me to create this website. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, 6 yearsFebruary 20, 2019 ago

Emotions

12 Adult Signs That You Experienced Emotional Abandonment In Childhood

If we were surrounded by emotionally available adult caregivers as an infant, our developing brain and nervous system learned to regulate our emotions via a healthy emotional attachment to the adults around us. However if we were surrounded by emotionally unavailable adults who routinely dismissed, minimised or suppressed both their own emotions and ours, we experienced emotional abandonment.

Being denied the emotional connection we needed as an infant can have a traumatic effect on our developing brain. Emotional abandonment can lead to Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) or what Susan Anderson calls PTSD of Abandonment in adults. The primary result is that we fail to develop healthy adult emotional regulation and can often end up feeling overwhelmed by our own emotions. This effect can last long into adulthood until we find a way to address it.

Emotional abandonment is a massive problem even in communities and families that are otherwise free of overt abuse. It’s fairly easy to recognise when you’ve been on the receiving end of physical, sexual or emotional abuse as a child and most adults recognise that reaching out for help is the appropriate, responsible and shameless thing to do.

However, with emotional abandonment the problem is fundamentally one of neglect and this is more difficult to recognise. We typically only have our own experience of childhood to compare against in identifying what is and isn’t normal or healthy. When you’re just a kid and everyone around you is avoiding emotional connection, it’s hard not to conclude that this is how to live. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, 6 yearsJuly 24, 2018 ago

Communication

How To Help Your Adult Child With A Mental Illness

I often meet parents whose adult children who are suffering from a mental illness such as anxiety, depression or anorexia, or who are suicidal. When I hear these parents talk about how they’re dealing with this situation, they often appear very stoic. They say things like “I need to be strong in order to support my son”, or remark that “I’ve told them that they are very strong”.

At the same time, I often notice my own feelings of emotional disconnection around these same parents during our interactions. They often talk a lot about themselves in great analytical detail but without much real emotional engagement, and rarely ask me about my own life or how I feel.

Empathy is the key to helping your adult child with a mental illness

I sense that they’re avoiding something in our conversations: a sense of emotional connection.

Unfortunately these behaviors are exactly the opposite of what a person with a mental illness needs in order to feel the sense of emotional safety, love and support that could potentially heal their brain and help them through a time of deep crisis.

While all parents instinctively love their adult children, mentally ill people need to be surrounded by love and support that they can actually feel.

This means being empathic rather than being stoic.

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By Graham Stoney, 7 yearsOctober 12, 2017 ago

Therapy

Is My Therapy Going Right?

I got a question via email last week about how to tell when therapy is working. Here it is, along with my answer:

I have been in psychoanalysis to treat emotional abuse for 4 years now, and am still in a really bad place. I exploded in anger and stopped talking to my mother, father, family and friends only writing to them to wish them dead in horrible ways. Then I burst into tears a few times realizing my friends do care and love me. But I am still feeling bad despite having been crying a lot in the past year and having a much better relationship with friends and family. I feel confused and lost. I wonder whether I should change therapists as after 4 years I still feel “like shit” and cannot work properly. Many thanks.

Thanks for your question; I’ll do my best to give you an answer based just on the little bit that you’ve told me. I get that at the moment you feel “like shit” as you’ve had 4 years of psychoanalysis and still cannot work properly, so you’re wondering if your therapy is going right or whether you should change therapists.

How do you know if therapy is really working?

The first thing I’d say is it sounds as if you’ve made a lot of progress over those 4 years: You got in touch with your inner rage when you exploded in anger; then you set a no-contact boundary when you stopped talking to your mother, father and family; then you communicated to them honestly how you felt as best you could; then you released some grief when you burst into tears a few times realizing that your friends do care and love you. You healed more grief about your family too, so you have been crying a lot in the past year. After all of that you have a much better relationship with your friends and family.

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By Graham Stoney, 8 yearsNovember 3, 2016 ago

Mindset

How’s Your Mental Health This Week?

It’s Mental Health Week here in Australia, and I’m very pleased to see many organisations and individuals talking about the topic of mental health in order to provide hope for healing and reduce the stigma surrounding mental illness in our community. I’m also a little anxious because the issue is close to my heart. There are many people who suffer from mental illness in my extended family and I know we still have a long way to go as a community in tackling the problems underlying the recent rapid increase in mental illness.

Having suffered from debilitating panic attacks, social phobia, generalised anxiety, depression and chronic fatigue myself, I know that these are real biological conditions which you can’t just “snap yourself out of” or simply wish away with positive thinking or well-intentioned affirmations alone.

Make A Move Towards Better Mental Health

Especially for men.

Destigmatising mental illness is certainly a step in the right direction, but if we want to help people living with mental illness to free themselves from their suffering, we need to go a step deeper and destigmatise the emotions behind it too.

Let’s face it: Men have feelings, and it’s time we stopped holding them in.

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By Graham Stoney, 10 yearsOctober 7, 2014 ago

Mindset

How To Cure Your Mental Illness

Rates of mental illness are rapidly increasing in the Western world. Depression and anxiety have become common place, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg compared to more severe mental illnesses such as bipolar, schizophrenia and so-called personality disorders such as borderline personality disorder. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, 11 yearsMay 30, 2013 ago

Mindset

Are You Suffering From Depression?

I want to talk about an issue most men don’t talk to other men about.

Most of us are too ashamed to talk about it, let alone seek any help for it.

Yet it affects a staggering number of us guys.

So I’ll cut to the chase: I’m talking about depression.

Maybe you’ve sought help and been diagnosed by a professional, or perhaps you just know deep down that you’re unhappy. Something is wrong with your life but you’re not sure what. Perhaps you feel hopeless for no good reason, or you just can’t get motivated, or the light has simply gone out of your life.

It’s a painful place to be.

Psychiatrists will tell you that depression is a “chemical imbalance in the brain”, and they’re right.

But that’s only half the story. The obvious question to ask is: what causes the chemical imbalance? (more…)

By Graham Stoney, 12 yearsApril 8, 2013 ago

Life Skills

How to Deal With Setbacks

Time for some truth-telling: things haven’t been entirely rosy here at Confident Man Headquarters in the last few months. Life has ups and downs, and I’m certainly not immune to the emotional roller-coaster effect they can cause. They say bad luck comes in threes and I don’t know if it’s just bad luck, bad karma or whatever, but I do know it hasn’t felt all that great lately.

So what’s been going on?

Well, firstly I started a new treatment program for Chronic Fatigue and although I’m cautiously optimistic of my health improving, one of the initial side-effects was being hit with a truckload of anxiety which left me feeling despondent, depressed and hopeless.

Around the same time I entered a Theatrical Improvisation (a.k.a. Improv) contest with some new friends of mine; only to withdraw before the contest had even begun because I was feeling overwhelmed with anxiety and stress. Something I loved doing suddenly stopped being fun.

I also quit Toastmasters because I now know enough about public speaking and it doesn’t make sense to pursue it any further until my health improves. This meant my social world was shrinking, right at the time I was feeling isolated, ill and anxious already.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, 12 yearsJune 13, 2012 ago

Relationships

How to Get Over the Girl Who Ripped Your Heart Out

Ever had a girl break your heart so badly you thought you’d never recover? Couldn’t get her off your mind? Desperate to get her back? Then you might find John’s story helpful; and besides, I need to debrief to get this guy out of my system.

I met John in a youth hostel while on a winter road trip up the east coast of Australia in search of warmer weather. He seemed like a decent guy who was always cracking jokes, and before long the two of us were entertaining some of the other backpackers with our stories of adventure and comic irony.

John seemed intrigued when I mentioned that I was a recovering perfectionist, and asked me several times to elaborate about that. I told him the story of how I had a fulfilling engineering career up until the point where I decided I didn’t enjoy it any more and decided to change direction. He could relate: John had studied law, and hated every minute of it. Then he’d joined the military, and he’d hated that too. He hated prosecuting people who hadn’t done anything wrong, and in general his conscience bothered him a lot. He was from California, which he hated because it was being over-run with Mexicans.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, 12 years ago

Emotions

Music For When You Feel Depressed

When you’re feeling low, listening to music that describes exactly how you feel can help you get more deeply in touch with, and hence process, your raw emotions. So long as you avoid creating a story about why you feel bad that just reinforces the feeling, listening to music you can relate to can help you to move on from unpleasant feelings.

Here’s a list of my favorite music for when I’m feeling sad, depressed or discouraged: